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The closed-class vocabulary as a closed set

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2015

Jill Chafetz
Jill Chafetz*
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University
*
Division of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, 1114 19th Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37212
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Abstract

Children who have normal language development are aware of the distinction between closed-class and open-class words at a very early age. In order to test to what extent children know the closed class to be, in fact, closed, 104 children aged 3 to 5 years participated in a sentence repetition task. Each sentence contained a nonsense word that fulfilled either an open-class or a closed-class function. Children were more likely to repeat sentences correctly when the nonsense words functioned in open-class, rather than in closed-class, contexts. In addition, older children correctly repeated more sentences containing nonsense words that functioned in closed-class contexts than younger children. This last result shows a mechanism by which children may acquire new closed-class words. The theoretical implications of the results are also discussed relative to children with specific language impairments, especially in terms of their reliance on semantic value in word acquisition.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , July 1994 , pp. 273 - 287
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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